Dockworkers in Greece have blocked the shipment of an ammunition-filled container destined for Israel, refusing to load the cargo onto a vessel at the Port of Piraeus, Anadolu Agency reports.
The container, reportedly transported to Greece via North Macedonia, was meant to be shipped to Israel’s Haifa Port.
However, in response to calls from local labour unions, dockworkers at the Piraeus Port gathered and took a firm stance, preventing the shipment from proceeding.
According to Greek State Television, ERT, the workers had written “Murderers, get out of the port” on the container and voiced their solidarity with the Palestinian people, chanting slogans such as “Freedom for Palestine”.
Markos Bekris, the president of the Piraeus Port Trade Union, released a statement condemning the shipment of ammunition intended for the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
“We have decided not to allow the shipment of war ammunition from the Port of Piraeus that will continue the genocide of the Palestinian people,” Bekris said, emphasizing that the workers would not stain their hands “with the blood of the Palestinian people”.
Bekris also urged Greece to halt any involvement in the conflict, calling for an immediate cessation of the country’s participation. “We demand that our country immediately stop engaging in the war,” he added.
Israel has continued a brutal offensive on Gaza following a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group, Hamas, on 7 October last year, despite a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire.
More than 42,400 people have since been killed, mostly women and children, and over 99,100 injured, according to local health authorities.
The Israeli onslaught has displaced almost the entire population of the Gaza Strip amid an ongoing blockade that has led to severe shortages of food, clean water and medicine.
Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its actions in Gaza.
UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti said on Friday that the Israeli army has repeatedly and deliberately attacked the UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon.
In remarks carried by Lebanese media, the UN mission spokesman said that the Israeli army targeted the UNIFIL forces five times deliberately.
Meanwhile, he noted that the Israeli occupation army has used phosphorus munitions.
“We found evidence of possible use of white phosphorus several months ago near one of our posts” in south Lebanon.
He added that the destruction inflicted upon the Lebanese border town due to Israeli bombardment was “shocking.”
However, Tenenti underlined the need for the international forces to stay in Lebanon, stressing that their morale is high.
Asked about the possibility of resorting to self-defense against the Israeli occupation army, the spokesman said: “It can be resorted to, but the priority now is for de-escalation.”
The Israeli occupation army has repeatedly attacked UNIFIL posts recently, with several times causing casualties among the international force members.
The latest attack was in the border southern town of Kfar Kila on Thursday, when and Israeli Merkava fired at a UNIFIL watchtower.
Germany’s Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, addressed parliament yesterday and justified Israel’s targeting of civilians in Gaza.
‘Self-defence means not only attacking terrorists but destroying them. When Hamas terrorists hide behind people, behind schools… civilian places lose their protected status because terrorists abuse it.’
This, however, is not true, according to human rights lawyer, Craig Mokhiber. The former senior UN human rights official told MEMO claims that Israel has a right to ‘self-defence’ in Gaza don’t have a standing in international law.
The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, strongly condemned the statements made by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Wednesday, in which she claimed that “Israel” can target civilians in Gaza for “self-defense.”
In a statement, Hamas said the “German government is unashamed of the targeting of civilians and hospitals as long as it provides security for Israel, and this is part of its commitments.”
Israel must refrain from even considering the option of striking Iranian nuclear infrastructure, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned in a statement to journalists on Thursday.
Tensions between Tehran and West Jerusalem have escalated in the weeks since Iran launched nearly 200 missiles at Israeli territory on October 1. Iran has said the strikes were conducted in retaliation for the killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, as well as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) general last month.
Israel has since vowed a “deadly, pinpoint accurate, and surprising” response to the attack, with Israeli lawmakers calling for devastating strikes on Tehran’s energy infrastructure, including its nuclear facilities. An ABC News report on Thursday also claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already signed off on a set of targets for the IDF’s response.
Ryabkov has stressed that attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be “catastrophic” and stated that Russia has “repeatedly warned and continues to caution [Israel] against even hypothetically considering the possibility” of such strikes.
“This would be a catastrophic development and a complete negation of all existing postulates in the area of ensuring nuclear safety,” the deputy minister said.
Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also cautioned Israel against striking Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities, stating that such an attack would be a “serious provocation.”
Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic has urged the Jewish state to refrain from taking further disproportionate escalatory steps, stressing that it would deliver a “decisive and regretful” response if Israel chose to retaliate for the October 1 missile strikes.
One Iranian source also told RT last week that if West Jerusalem did decide to attack Iran’s energy infrastructure, such as oil refineries, power plants and nuclear facilities, Tehran would respond by striking similar targets in Israel.
It’s almost hilarious if it wasn’t so damnable. The Israeli regime is attacking United Nations peacekeepers and all the pathetic European governments can muster is a mealy-mouthed plea “that these attacks must stop immediately.”
Some 15 members of the UN’s Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) have been injured so far after the Orwellian-named Israeli Defense Forces attacked their bases. There are credible reports of IDF tanks deliberately crashing into a UNIFIL base, a watchtower being blown up by Israeli artillery, and chemical weapons fired at peacekeepers.
UNIFIL is deployed in Southern Lebanon under a United Nations Security Council resolution to uphold a peace deal brokered after the 2006 war with Israel. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon last month and the ongoing bombardment of the entire country is a gross violation of the UNSC resolution 1701.
Troops from 16 European nations participate in the UNIFIL peacekeeping operation, with France, Italy, and Spain providing the largest contingencies.
The European Union issued a statement: “The EU condemns all attacks against UN missions. It expresses particularly grave concern regarding the attacks by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) against the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which left several peacekeepers wounded. Such attacks against UN peacekeepers constitute a grave violation of international law and are totally unacceptable.”
It added: “We are also deeply concerned by Hezbollah’s continued launch of rockets into Israel that has to stop, and by IDF strikes in densely populated areas of Lebanon, causing a heavy toll on civilians and the displacement of many. We urge all parties to respect International Humanitarian Law, in all circumstances.”
Note how the European governments sneakily hedge and qualify the condemnation of the Israeli regime and insinuate that Hezbollah is also involved in “all attacks against UN missions.”
The European response to Israeli attacks on its UN troops is pathetically craven. The empty bluster about “grave concern” is nothing but a green light for Israel to continue its war crimes.
Ironically, the European NATO armchair generals like to invoke the “appeasement” argument when they talk about how important it is to stand up to Russia over Ukraine. That argument is completely baseless in the case of Russia and Ukraine. However, it is entirely appropriate regarding Israel and genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, where the Europeans are the most contemptible appeasers.
In the same week that the Israeli regime attacked UN peacekeepers in Southern Lebanon, it blew up a UN-run school for refugees in Gaza killing dozens, and it incinerated women and children sheltering in tents outside a UN-supported hospital.
The Israeli genocide in Gaza, now extended to Lebanon, has absolute contempt for the UN and international law. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has even been declared persona non grata by the Israeli regime.
Israel’s psychopathic prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has the gall to tell the UN to get its peacekeepers out of Southern Lebanon, “out of harm’s way.” With twisted logic, he claims that Hezbollah is using the UNIFIL troops as “human shields.” This is the same perverse logic that Netanyahu’s fascist regime has used to justify the murder of over 42,000 Palestinians who were described as human shields for Hamas.
As a sign of protest, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez has urged the European Union to suspend a free trade agreement with Israel. Sanchez’s call will be ignored. Just like French president Emmanuel Macron’s call to halt weapons exports to Israel was ignored.
Meanwhile, this week, the European Union imposed trade sanctions on Iran over dubious allegations that it has supplied ballistic missiles and drones to Russia for the conflict in Ukraine. Iran and Russia have strenuously denied the allegation. But the EU has no hesitation in imposing the sanctions.
That Israel is now attacking United Nations peacekeepers in south Lebanon might well be decisive in turning its few remaining “friends” against it. Spain, France, Ireland and Italy, all of which contribute to the peacekeepers force (UNIFIL), and which continued to look the other way when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of war criminals committed atrocity after atrocity against Arabs, are now finding themselves mortified when European soldiers are being attacked and wounded by cannon fire from snipers and Israeli tanks. In one incident, Israeli armored vehicles smashed their way through the gate of a UNIFIL base, allegedly using chemical weapons that injured 15 UN soldiers. The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is urging Europeans to cut off all trade and especially weapons sales with Israel. French President Emmanuel Macron declared an embargo on selling weapons to Israel and called for an immediate cease fire while several prime ministers have all expressed their “outrage” at the Israeli actions. Even the occupied-by-Israel UK declared itself to be “appalled.” Giorgia Meloni of Italy observed that two bases manned by Italian soldiers had been hit. Her Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto called the attack on the UNIFIL bases “totally unacceptable,” elaborating that “This was not a mistake and not an accident. It could constitute a war crime and represents a very serious violation of international military law.” He might have also added that since it was a gross violation of the UN Charter countries including permanent Security Council members China and Russia are demanding a full investigation of what took place.
As usual, Israel portrayed itself as the innocent victim surrounded by evil neighbors. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called on the UN chief to remove the UN peacekeepers who are now deployed in southern Lebanon. He claimed, without providing any evidence, that UNIFIL was serving as a “human shield to Hezbollah terrorists… This endangers both [those in UNIFIL] and the lives of our soldiers… Mr. Secretary General, get the UNIFIL forces out of harm’s way. It should be done right now, immediately.” The reality is, of course, that anyone encountering armed Israelis is automatically in “harm’s way,” ask any Palestinian. The Israeli armed forces, having already killed scores of UN workers during their 13-month siege of Gaza, appear set to double down and take on UN peacekeeping forces on their mission to expand the war to Syria and Iran. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has thus far refused to remove UNIFIL.
Regarding UNIFIL, the United States characteristically played its usual game of protecting Israel and throwing in a couple of misrepresentations of fact while saying nothing substantive. A National Security Council spokesman said that the White House is “deeply concerned” by reports Israel fired on the UN peacekeeper headquarters and bases in south Lebanon. “We understand Israel is conducting targeted operations near the Blue Line to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure that could be used to threaten Israeli citizens. While they undertake these operations, it is critical that they not threaten UN peacekeepers’ safety and security.” It was an all too rare expression of the reality that the United States is being dragged into a war in which it has no real interests by a ruthless client state that has been able to buy or coerce nearly all Congressmen into cheering and singing its song while also controlling much of the relevant bureaucracy and the White House itself. It is also being reported that a beefed up CIA station at the US Embassy in Beirut is collecting information on Hezbollah that is passed on to Israel to assist in its targeting.
It is not the first attack by Israel on United Nations personnel and it will probably not be the last as the Israel Occupation Force (IOF) has been de facto waging war against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Gaza over the past year, targeting and killing its personnel and denying or blocking its largely humanitarian mission. And the United Nations is also a target more generally speaking. At his most recent visit to the UN in New York, the monstrous Netanyahu exhibited a new low even for him, shouting to a nearly empty General Assembly room that the UN has become a “swamp of antisemitic bile,” again playing his favorite tune that Israel is always the victim. And the US has played a role in that campaign, denying any funding to the UNRWA and other international human rights bodies while also attacking the UN’s broader mission which has been to prevent wars of choice like what is occurring in what was once Palestine.
Inevitably, however, the Zionist fanatics in power in Washington are still motivated to ride the Israeli horse no matter who Netanyahu marks for death, leading to strident calls in Congress, mostly coming from Christian Zionist Republicans, to defund or even leave the United Nations completely. Given Donald Trump’s total fealty to Israel, it is something he just might consider doing if he is reelected. And the threats from individual congressmen to kill UN officials as well as justices and their families who serve on the international courts are all part of what one is hearing.
One particularly charming threat comes from a Jewish former White House advisor Matthew Brodsky, who has lived and studied in Israel. Brodsky recommended in a tweet on X that Israel should attack Irish peacekeepers in South Lebanon, suggesting what kind of advice the White House and Congress are accustomed to receive regarding Israel and Palestine from their overwhelmingly Jewish foreign policy team, which consists of nearly all confirmed Zionists, including President Biden, and also includes a number of dual nationals who hold Israeli citizenship. Brodsky’s background includes briefing members of Congress, the Department of State, Department of Defense and the National Security Council on Iran, Syria and Palestinian-Israeli issues. Brodsky is currently a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy and a former Director of Policy at the Jewish Policy Center. He wrote that: “Israel should carpet bomb the Irish area and then drop napalm over it.” The tweet included a map showing the deployment of Ireland’s peacekeeping force in Southern Lebanon, presumably to help guide the Israeli pilots.
There is considerable evidence that Brodsky is far from alone in expressing his complete loyalty to Israel no matter what crimes it commits. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, also Jewish and possibly a dual national, has been acting as Israel’s lawyer, complete with lies about Israeli behavior to cover-up war crimes like the deliberate starving of the Gazan people that equates to genocide. And he is joined in the Middle East by Amos Hochstein, Joe Biden’s personal roving ambassador to the region, who reportedly connived at Israel’s recent invasion of Lebanon. And clearly there is a long tradition of asserting Jewish supremacism within the upper levels of the US government. Last year Stuart Seldowitz, a former US State Department official, was filmed in New York City threatening an ethnic Egyptian halal food street vendor, calling him a terrorist. Seldowitz was recorded saying that the death of 4,000 Palestinian children “wasn’t enough”, highlighting legitimate concerns about anti-Palestinian sentiment among some former US officials. Seldowitz worked for former State Secretary Madeline Albright, who in a shocking interview once justified the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children, stating her view that the killings were “worth it”.
So where do we go from here. Sometimes recognizing that we have a problem can be the first step in coming up with a solution. To my mind, the rot started with President Harry Truman, who sold out to Jewish money and media power in the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, which real statesmen like Secretary of State George Marshall warned against. Some would put the betrayal earlier, with the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. In any event, it is now counter to actual US interests to be so totally subservient to Israeli priorities. A good first step would be to require the constituent groups that make up the Israel Lobby to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would require them to reveal their sources of income and their connections to Israel. It would also prohibit them from interfering in US politics. In addition, it does not make sense to send American Ambassadors and Emissaries to Israel who are far more loyal to Israel than to the United States, as the last several have been. Nor does it make sense to have a Jewish/Zionist Secretary of State backed up by a largely Jewish staff and White House cabinet to carry out diplomacy in the Middle East. Diplomacy is precisely what Blinken has not been doing and if he had any decency, which he does not, he would in any event recuse himself from involvement with anything having to do with Israel.
The unconditional ironclad pledge to defend a nation carrying out a genocide while simultaneously seeking to go to war with all its neighbors is a formula for initiating World War III, which will kill millions of people. Indeed, Biden, who has been discussing with Netanyahu how to attack Iran, has now deployed to Israel a $1.15 billion Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system to be manned by 100 American soldiers on the ground in Israel. The Washington Postis reporting that Israel has decided to attack military sites in Iran before the US election. This is just what Netanyahu wants as he will initiate a new conflict with Iran, Iran will retaliate, possibly killing US military based inside Israel, and bingo the US will be at war. In truth, the world needs less of a rabid dog Jewish state calling the shots as well as less of a corrupted and befuddled America dedicated to protecting the ravening beast. International lawyer John Whitbeck has described the current reality best: “By their venality, cowardice, moral bankruptcy and near-treason, the American political class is flushing a once great country down history’s toilet, and the Global West, if it does not liberate itself from domination by the Israeli-American Empire, risks a similar fate.”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
It’s been over two months since the Kiev regime launched its incursion into the Kursk oblast (region). The area was previously limited only to cross-border skirmishes, artillery duels and occasional sabotage operations, which was why the Russian military deployed Rosgvardiya, particularly the “Akhmat” special forces mostly composed of personnel from Chechnya. These units were not equipped to handle army-sized invading forces and it took some time for the regular military to move in and prevent further advances by the Neo-Nazi junta troops. Expectedly, as PR “victories” are the most important segment of the latter’s strategy, this was heavily (ab)used to sow discord within Russia, with the Kiev regime trying to present Chechens as “TikTok soldiers”. However, war propaganda was the least of the Neo-Nazi junta’s crimes in the occupied parts of this Russian region.
However, as Moscow’s forces keep advancing, they’re finding evidence of war crimes by the Kiev regime. Perhaps the most concerning is the disappearance of around 1000 locals. The Kremlin has issued a formal accusation that the Neo-Nazi junta forces kidnapped 1,000 residents of the Kursk region. Russian authorities confirmed this after the relatives of the missing locals pleaded with the government to help find them.
“I’ve received messages regarding more than 1,000 such people from relatives trying to find them. We know nothing about their fate. This is a gross violation of their rights and international norms of treatment of civilians,” presidential human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova said on October 14, adding: “I think it would be useful to remind you that the forced removal of civilians from their places of permanent residence is a gross violation of the Geneva Convention. And the world community should probably give this a proper assessment.”
The “Dahiya doctrine” is an illegal, Israeli military strategy involving the large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure, or ‘domicide’.
The doctrine’s goal (which invariably fails to materialize) is to pressure governments and resistance groups to submit to Israel’s aggression.
The doctrine was first championed by former Israeli Chief of General Staff Gadi Eizenkot.
Eizenkot is currently a Minister without portfolio in Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right regime.
Dimitri Lascaris is currently in Beirut, Lebanon. In this report, he examines the effects of the ‘Dayiha doctine’ in the very city from which the doctrine derives its name.
Today (October 13, 2024), Lascaris visited a neighbourhood in Dahiya which Israel bombed several days ago.
You can support Dimitri Lascaris and his work on Patreon here💰: / reason2resist
Connect with other Dimitri Lascaris social platforms
The UN Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, confirmed on 14 October that the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) would “stay in all its positions” inside Lebanon after Israeli attacks injured at least five blue helmets.
“The decision was made that UNIFIL would currently stay in all its positions in spite of the calls that were made by the Israel Defense Forces to vacate the positions that are in the vicinity of the Blue Line,” Lacroix told reporters on Monday.
“I want to emphasize that this decision still remains,” he stressed, adding that the plan was confirmed earlier in the day by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
The statement came a few hours after the 15-member UN Security Council (UNSC) for the first time unanimously voiced “strong concerns” about the safety of UNIFIL troops.
“Against the backdrop of ongoing hostilities along the Blue Line, the members of the Security Council expressed their strong concerns after several UNIFIL positions came under fire in the past days,” said the council’s rotating presidency, currently Switzerland’s UN ambassador Pascale Baeriswyl.
“They recalled that UN peacekeepers and UN premises must never be the target of an attack,” the UNSC statement adds, without ever naming Israel.
Over the past week, UN positions and bases in southern Lebanon have come under repeated attacks by the invading army. In the most recent of these, UNIFIL revealed that Israeli tanks “destroyed the position’s main gate and forcibly entered the position.”
According to the Israeli military, the incursion into the UNIFIL base came after fighters from Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah fired anti-tank missiles at Israeli troops, wounding at least 25 of them.
The UN decision to keep its troops inside Lebanon came just hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated his call for UNIFIL to “get our of harm’s way.”
UNIFIL was founded in response to Israel’s invasion of south Lebanon in 1978.
Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, told reporters on Monday that “attacks against peacekeepers are in breach of international law, including international humanitarian law, and they may constitute war crime.”
Last week, Hezbollah accused Israel of using the UN troops as “human shields.”
“The Israeli enemy is attempting to use UNIFIL forces as human shields to cover its failure to advance … The operations room of the Islamic Resistance instructed the fighters to hold back and not engage with the movement to protect the lives of international soldiers,” the Hezbollah statement reads.
Dr Soma Baroud, was killed on 9 October when Israeli warplanes bombed the taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans near Bani Suhaila roundabout, Khan Yunis.
“Your lives will continue. With new events and new faces. They are the faces of your children, who will fill your homes with noise and laughter.”
These were the last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.
Dr Soma Baroud was murdered on 9 October when Israeli warplanes bombed the taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
I still don’t know whether she was on her way to the hospital where she worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter?
The news of her assassination — which was a political murder; Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 166 doctors — arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page: “Update: these are the names of the martyrs of the latest Israeli bombing of two taxis in the Khan Yunis area…” It was followed by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the list, number 42,010 on Gaza’s ever-growing list of martyrs.
I refused to believe the news, even when more posts began popping up everywhere on social media, listing her as number five, and sometimes six in the list of martyrs of the Khan Yunis air strike.
I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never answered the call.
I had told her repeatedly that she does not need to bother with elaborate text or audio messages due to the unreliable internet connection and electricity.
“Every morning,” I said, “just type: ‘We are fine’.” That’s all I asked of her.
But she would skip several days without writing, often due to the lack of an internet connection. Then, a message would arrive, although never brief. She wrote with a torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive, to her fears for her children, to poetry, to a Qur’anic verse, to one of her favourite novels, and so on.
“You know, what you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” she told me on more than one occasion, before she would take the conversation into the most complex philosophical spins. I would listen, and just repeat, “Yes… totally… I agree… one hundred per cent.”
For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, although grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.
I wrote about Soma as a central character in my book My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, because she was indeed central to our lives, and to our very survival in a Gaza refugee camp.
The first born, and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and expectations than the rest of us. She was just a child when my eldest brother, Anwar, still a toddler, died in an UNRWA clinic at the Nuseirat refugee camp due to the lack of medicine. Then, she was introduced to pain, the kind of pain that with time turned into a permanent state of grief that would never abandon her until her murder by a US-supplied Israeli bomb in Khan Yunis.
Two years after the death of Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar, so that the legacy of the first boy could carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.
My father began his life as a child labourer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army, then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once again, a labourer, because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza police force after the 1967 Naksa (the Six Day War).
A clever, principled man, and a self-taught intellectual, my Dad did everything he could to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way. When he decided to become a merchant, as in buying discarded and odd items in Israel and repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Although her skin healed, cuts on her fingers due to wrapping thousands of razors individually, remained as a testament to the difficult life she lived.
“Soma’s little finger is worth more than a thousand men,” my father would often repeat, to remind us, eventually five boys, that our sister will always be the main heroine in the family’s story. Now that she is a martyr, that legacy has been secured for eternity.
Years later, my parents sent her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, although never her own.
She worked at Al-Shifa Hospital and Nasser Hospital among other medical centres. Later, she obtained another certificate in family medicine, and opened a clinic of her own. She did not charge the poor, and did all she could to heal those victimised by war.
Soma was a member of a generation of female doctors in Gaza who truly changed the face of medicine.
Collectively, they put great emphasis on the rights of women to medical care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality as well as the vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.
When my daughter Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the ongoing war, she told me that, “When aunt Soma walked into the hospital, an entourage of women — doctors, nurses and other medical staff — would surround her in total adoration.”
At one point, it felt that all of Soma’s suffering was finally paying off: a nice family home in Khan Yunis, with a small olive orchard, and a few palm trees; a loving husband, a professor of law and eventually the dean of law school at a reputable Gaza university; three daughters and two sons, whose educational specialties ranged from dentistry to pharmacy, to law to engineering.
Even under siege, life — at least for Soma and her family — seemed manageable. True, she was not allowed to leave the Strip for many years due to the blockade, and thus we were denied the chance to see her for years on end. True, she was tormented by loneliness and seclusion, hence her love affair with and constant citation of García Márquez’s seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or missing. Her beautiful house and clinic were still standing. And she was living and breathing, communicating her philosophical nuggets about life, death, memories and hope. And then…
“If I could only find the remains of Hamdi, so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote to me last January, when the news circulated that her husband had been executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis. Because his body was missing, she held on to some faint hope that he was still alive. Her boys, on the other hand, kept digging in the wreckage and debris of the area where Hamdi was shot, hoping to find him and give him a proper burial. They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away, and return with their shovels to carry on with the grim task.
To maximise their chances of survival, my sister’s family decided to split up between displacement camps and other family homes in southern Gaza. This meant that Soma had to be in a constant state of moving, travelling, often long distances on foot, between towns, villages and refugee camps, just to check on her children, following every incursion, and every massacre.
“I am exhausted,” she kept telling me. “All I want from life is for this war to end, for cosy new pyjamas, my favourite book, and a comfortable bed.”
These simple and reasonable expectations looked like a mirage, especially when her home in the Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month. “My heart aches,” she wrote. “Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble.”
She pointed out that this is not a story about stones and concrete. “It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I write or speak. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarrelled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family.”
A few days before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbours in Qarara. She sent me a photo taken by her son, as she sat on a makeshift chair, on which she also slept amidst the ruins. She looked tired, so very tired.
There was nothing I could say or do to convince her to leave. She insisted that she wanted to keep an eye on the rubble of what remained of her home. Her logic made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me, and instead kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble, an old photo, a small olive tree, a birth certificate…
My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war is over, I would do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the whole family would meet in Egypt, or Turkiye, and that we would shower her with gifts, and boundless family love. I finished with, “Let’s start planning now. Whatever you want. You just say it. Awaiting your instructions…” She never saw the message.
Even when her name, as yet another casualty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was mentioned in local Palestinian news, I refused to believe it. I continued to call. “Please pick up, Soma, please pick up,” I pleaded.
Only when a video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an ambulance did I think that maybe my sister was indeed gone.
Some of the bags had the names of the others mentioned in the social media posts. Each bag was pulled out separately and placed on the ground. A group of mourners, bereaved men, women and children would rush to hug the body, screaming the same shouts of agony and despair that have accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.
Then, another bag, with “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” written across the thick white plastic.
Her colleagues carried her body and laid it gently on the ground. They were about to zip the bag open to confirm her identity. I looked away.
I refuse to see her in any way but the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom; someone whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”
But why do I continue to check my messages with the hope that she will text me to tell me that the whole thing was a major, cruel misunderstanding and that she is okay?
My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt, somewhere in Khan Yunis.
It’s time for the American people to stand up to Washington and demand an immediate end to the endless support the United States has provided toapartheid Israel for its killing spree during the past year.
In the besieged Gaza Strip, Tel Aviv has murdered, mutilated, and maimed roughly 215,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children. Those figures do not include countless thousands of Palestinians missing or presumed dead beneath the 40 million tons of rubble Israel’s war has generated.
Last month, the Gaza Health Ministry published a 649-page document providing information regarding 34,344 murdered Palestinians identified thus far.
Antiwar.com news editor Dave DeCamp reported that, “The document lists 11,355 children, including 710 infants under the age of one, as Palestinian babies have been killed throughout the genocidal campaign. The infants are listed on the first 14 pages of the document…Out of the 34,344 people who have been identified, 60% are children, women, and elderly. The remaining 40% are men ranging in age from 18 to 59.” Currently, the total number of Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza is approximately 16,800.
Vice president of the International College of Surgeons, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon based in North Carolina, volunteered his services in Gaza between April and May this year. In July, he lamented to CBS News unequivocally that “[of] all of the disasters I’ve seen, combined—40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined—doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.”
He bluntly described Tel Aviv killing children on an unprecedented scale, warning Israeli military snipers were deliberately shooting children and murdering toddlers:
“I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week…missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds. And then there’s sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice.”
After being asked to clarify his statement, Perlmutter said, “I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the ‘world’s best sniper.’ And they’re dead-center shots.”
CBS noted that over twenty doctors had recounted similar child slayings. One American doctor reportedly felt compelled to review CT scans to confirm what he saw with his own eyes because he “didn’t believe that this many children could be admitted to a single hospital with gunshot wounds to the head.”
In April, Dr. Fozia Alvi, a Canadian physician, described her experience treating two children shot in the brain by Israeli snipers during her last day volunteering at southern Gaza’s European hospital. Alvi told The Guardian, “I asked the nurse, what’s the history? She said that they were brought in a couple of hours ago. They had sniper shots to the brain. They were seven or eight years old.”
She elaborated, “They were not able to talk, paraplegic. They were literally lying down as vegetables on those beds. They were not the only ones. I saw even small children with direct sniper shot wounds to the head as well as in the chest. They were not combatants, they were small children.”
Scores of American doctors, surgeons, nurses, and emergency room physicians have confirmed these accounts, writing multiple open letters to the White House urging the Joe Biden administration to cease support for the Israeli genocide and warning that the true death toll already includes more than 118,000 Palestinians, vastly exceeding Palestinian Health Ministry estimates.
One July letterfeatures Asma Taha, a pediatric nurse practitioner based in Oregon, describing the nightmare of living as a pregnant mother, newborn infant, or fetus trapped and under siege in the Gaza death camp. “Every day I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved,” she wrote.
Another open letter sent to the White House was signed this month by ninety-nine American physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, surgeons, and midwives who’ve spent a combined 254 weeks volunteering in Gaza. “This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population,” it reads.
The medics continue, describing the devastating toll that the genocidal campaign has taken on the entire civilian population:
“With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”
Israel’s brutal siege warfare, combined with constant bombing of civilian infrastructure including water systems, is designed to spread diseases by systematically liquidating and infecting Palestinian children, newborns, and babies.
As the American medical volunteers have thoroughly detailed:
“Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhea. We found cases of jaundice (indicating hepatitis A infection under such conditions) in nearly every room of the hospitals in which we served, and in many of our healthcare colleagues in Gaza. An astonishingly high percentage of our surgical incisions became infected from the combination of malnutrition, impossible operating conditions, lack of basic sanitation supplies such as soap, and lack of surgical supplies and medications, including antibiotics.
“Malnutrition led to widespread spontaneous abortions, underweight newborns, and an inability of new mothers to breastfeed. This left their newborns at high risk of death given the lack of access to potable water anywhere in Gaza. Many of those infants died. In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies…
We urge you to realize that epidemics are raging in Gaza. Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas without running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking. It was and remains guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five. Indeed, even the dreaded polio virus has reemerged in Gaza due to a combination of systematic destruction of the sanitation infrastructure, widespread malnutrition weakening immune systems, and young children having missed routine vaccinations for nearly an entire year. We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.”
These doctors reaffirmed the claims from the previous letters and testimonies from medical volunteers that Israeli snipers are relentlessly targeting children as young as toddlers with head shots:
“Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis,” the letter states. The American medical professionals insist, “It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.”
Perlmutter is quoted again, emphasizing, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.”
It is absolutely clear that supporting Israel, quite literally, means mass murdering children every day in our name and on our dime. Since October 2023, the AIPAC-owned Congress has robbed over $22 billion of Americans’ hard-earned money, amidst crippling inflation, to facilitate and underwrite this genocide. Now, Tel Aviv wants to take our kids to war with Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine simultaneously.
Americans are lectured incessantly, including by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that this is all obligatory and essential. We are told Americans must fight and die on the side of Israeli “civilization” against Middle Eastern “barbarism.” This author defies anyone to try to make a case for our “shared values” with the Israelis after reading these American doctors’ testimonies.
The CIA has sent additional agents to Lebanon and has increased its communications with Lebanese military, security, and political officials in an effort to obtain information about Hezbollah, and may have played a role in Israel’s recent attempt to assassinate a Hezbollah political leader, Al-Akhbarreported on 14 October.
Three senior officials in the official security services acknowledged that Western parties, primarily the US, have initiated intensive daily communication with all Lebanese military and security forces since the outbreak of the open war between Lebanon and Israel, Al-Akhbar editor Ibrahim al-Amin wrote.
The officials told Amin that the content of the communications had nothing to do with obtaining information about threats to western interests. Instead, they wish to obtain information about changes in Hezbollah’s political and military leadership structure after the recent assassination of the party’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah.
US intelligence officials were very interested in whether Hezbollah leaders are “still communicating with the military, security and executive forces in Lebanon after the war, with questions about the form and content of the communication,” one official told Amin.
The same official revealed that a security team of 15 CIA officers arrived at Beirut airport last Thursday, 10 October, and moved in a convoy of armored cars without license plates to the headquarters of the American embassy in Awkar.
He explained that the team “joined the work cell based in one of the embassy wings in Beirut, to help manage the Beirut station, which includes 12 main officers, in addition to others with different specialties, including recruiting and managing agents, collecting information through technical means, and analyzing data.”
Another official told Amin that a new director for the CIA’s Beirut station, Sherry Baker, had been appointed and that Baker had previously participated in meetings with Lebanese security officials during visits to Washington.
The official said he knew of “five working visits by Lebanese officers of various levels to the United States, who held meetings with American intelligence officials at their headquarters in Langley.”
In this context, Amin reports that these contacts between the CIA and Lebanese security officials may have played a role in Israel’s recent attempt to assassinate a Hezbollah political leader, Wafiq Safa.
On 10 October, Israeli airstrikes leveled a residential building in central Beirut, killing 22 people. Israel stated that Safa was the target of the attack. However, they were unsuccessful in killing him.
One of the three officials revealed to Amin that just prior to the assassination attempt, the leadership of Hezbollah had asked Safa, in his capacity as head of the resistance movement’s Liaison and Coordination Committee, to communicate with a number of Lebanese security officials on matters related to the ongoing war.
The official explained that “the contacts took place despite the fact that the resistance knew that the mere occurrence of the phone call would constitute a security threat to Safa.”
These fears were confirmed when Israel carried out the bombing in Beirut and leaked news that the target was Safa.
The same official said that Hezbollah “estimates that American intelligence had a direct role in the attempt to assassinate Safa” and that “the operation was carried out based on information provided by the Americans.”
The official stated that the US wanted to kill Safa, who has no military role in Hezbollah, as part of a campaign launched by the US Ambassador to Beirut, Lisa Johnson, who recently “called on Lebanese political and non-political forces to begin working to establish the stage of “post-Hezbollah Lebanon.”
By Jeb Smith | The Libertarian Institute | April 20, 2026
In Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions, Professor Todd Rose explains that to belong to a group, people “keep twisting [themselves] into pretzels, trying to conform to what we falsely believe everyone else expects of us.” Seeking acceptance from the group, we conform in language, behavior, beliefs, and practices. As a result, we lose our individuality and aggregate into herds. Within our group we create an alternate reality to fit whichever collective mindset we attach ourselves to, and interpret the world through those lenses—our innate desire to belong overrides reality.
Rose says these illusions “have become a defining feature of our modern society.” In other words, the collectivist mindset is a great conduit for spreading illusions; thus, it is the politician’s favored form of governance.
Rose points to studies in psychology and neuroscience showing we delude ourselves into believing what the majority does, even if it is not what we desire or know to be accurate. … continue
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